Smartphone tells if you are angry

Calm down Dave

Researchers working forSamsung have emerged from their smokefilled labs with a smartphone with tells if you are angry.

Apparently it does not need specialised sensors or cameras, but it works out your emotional state based on how you are using the phone.

It looks at the speed at which a user types, how often the "backspace" or "special symbol" buttons are pressed, and how much the device shakes.

Apparently these enable the machine to work out if user is happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, or disgusted.

Hosub Lee, a researcher with Samsung Electronics and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology's Intelligence Group told Technology Review such inputs may seem to have little to do with emotions, but there are correlations between these behaviours and one's mind, which the software's machine-learning algorithms can detect with an accuracy of 67.5 percent.

Samsung is showing off the phone at the Consumer Communications and Networking Conference next week. It is designed to work as part of a Twitter client on an Android-based Samsung Galaxy S II.

It enables people in a social network to view symbols alongside tweets that indicate that person's mood.

Lee said the system could trigger different ringtones on a phone to convey the caller's emotional state or cheer up someone who's feeling down.

Sadly he seems to think that a phone showing a funny cartoon to make the user feel better, so we are not sure if he has really got the idea about what will cheer us up first thing on Monday morning.

He said that later emotion detection is likely to attract the interest of advertisers who can provide more personalised services depending on your mood.